Can foreigners buy property in Vietnam?

Vietnam is the Southeast Asian market most often compared to Indonesia on growth, and its ownership rules sit somewhere between Thailand's and Indonesia's.

What foreigners can hold

Land is owned by the state. Nobody in Vietnam holds freehold land, including Vietnamese citizens. What exists are land use rights, granted for terms, and the difference between citizens and foreigners is the length and conditions of those rights.

Foreigners may own apartments and houses in eligible commercial housing projects, for a term commonly stated as fifty years, renewable subject to approval.

Quotas apply. A foreign buyer cannot simply buy any unit. There are limits on the proportion of units in a building and the proportion of houses in a ward that may be foreign-owned, and once a project hits its quota, no further foreign purchases are permitted there.

Only eligible projects qualify. Older buildings, projects in restricted areas, and land near sites of defence or security significance are excluded.

The renewal question

The fifty year term is renewable "subject to approval". That phrasing is doing a lot of work and it is the central uncertainty in Vietnamese foreign ownership.

The framework is relatively young. A large cohort of foreign-owned units has not yet reached renewal, which means there is limited practical precedent for how renewals will be handled at scale, on what terms, and at what cost.

Buyers should treat this the way I would treat an Indonesian lease with a prioritas extension clause: assume you hold the initial term, and treat the renewal as an upside rather than a certainty.

Versus Indonesia

Registration. A Vietnamese foreign ownership certificate — the "pink book" — is a registered document. An Indonesian leasehold is registered nowhere. Vietnam's instrument is structurally stronger.

Term. Fifty years in Vietnam against twenty-five to thirty per Indonesian lease term, though Indonesian practice reaches similar totals through agreed extensions.

Quota. Vietnam restricts how much foreigners can hold in a building or ward. Indonesia has no equivalent quota on leaseholds.

Product. Vietnam's foreign-accessible stock is overwhelmingly apartments in developments. Indonesia's is standalone villas with land. These suit very different buyers.

Yield. Vietnamese residential gross yields in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are commonly in the low to mid single digits, which is considerably below what a well-run Bali villa nets. Vietnam is a capital growth market; Bali is an income market.

Exit. Selling a foreign-owned Vietnamese unit means selling to another foreigner within the quota, or to a Vietnamese buyer, with the term reduced by however long you held it. That is a narrower pool than it first appears.

What Vietnam has going for it

A large, young, urbanising population. Sustained manufacturing investment. Genuine economic growth. Infrastructure being built at pace.

Those are real structural drivers of long-term property demand, and they are stronger in Vietnam than in Bali, whose demand is tourism-dependent and therefore more exposed to flight capacity, sentiment and regulation.

What to be careful about

Buy only in eligible projects with confirmed foreign quota remaining. Verify the quota position in writing before paying anything.

Off-plan is the dominant product and carries the same counterparty risk as anywhere, without a strong statutory deposit protection regime.

Developer quality varies enormously. The gap between the best Vietnamese developers and the rest is very wide, and the paperwork on a weak project can take years to issue.

The pink book can be slow. Foreign ownership certificates have been delayed on some projects for extended periods, during which you have paid but hold no registered document.

Which suits which buyer

Vietnam for a capital growth position in a genuinely growing economy, in an apartment, accepting a fifty year term with an uncertain renewal and a modest yield.

Bali for income from a property you will use, accepting a shorter term, no registration, and dependence on tourism.

They are not substitutes and buyers choosing between them are usually optimising for different things without having said so.